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Take Flight
July 26, 2007 12:33 PM
Sally Ann Triplett as Amelia Earhart
in Take Flight
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Flight of some kind is what we inevitably wish for every time we go to the theatre—an evening to lift us out of ourselves and carry us somewhere else for several hours. So the first thing to be said about the new art musical, Take Flight, is that on those metaphor-laden terms, the show very much delivers: I doubt audiences, especially in London, will bring that much to the table in advance of a show chronicling the overlapping airborne ambitions of four American pioneers of the aviation industry: Orville and Wilbur Wright, Charles Lindbergh and that doomed daredevil of the skies, Amelia Earhart. It's additionally bracing, too, to find a genuinely original musical poking its own aspirational head above a London musical landscape littered with facetious, not strictly necessary revivals (Joseph); ceaseless pastiches of the genre (The Drowsy Chaperone, Spamalot), and retreads of shows that looked like retreads the first time round (Fame, Buddy, Footloose). Where's all hope of freshness gone? One answer lies in a show described in advance as inevitably embryonic, though that's to sell short the terrifically assured direction of Sam Buntrock, on a sloping, sandy set by Buntrock's Sunday in the Park collaborator, David Farley, defined by piles of packing crates flanking musical director Caroline Humphris' orchestra to both sides. Will the show be to everyone's taste? Inevitably not, and some may remain dry and dispassionate towards a topic that can be taken as its own trope for writing musical theatre itself. But anyone interested in pushing the form onward are advised to catch the show first and debate it later, though to my mind there's not much question that the score marks easily the most aurally sensuous collaboration yet between lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. and his longtime collaborator, the Oscar-winning composer, David Shire.
Eliot Levey and Sam Kenyon
as the Wright Brothers in Take Flight
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Across 17 scenes, John Weidman's deft book introduces us to a quartet of "heroic visionairies"—or are they? With Clive Carter's thickly accented inventor/mathematician Otto Lillienthal weaving through the action like some kind of spokesman of doom, we meet the various eccentrics who dared to defy gravity, in one case paying with her life. The stories amount less to a strict narrative per se than to a sort of largely sung hymn to the impossible. The great risk, as Otto is there to remind us, is failure or even death. That prospect is articulated flat out by Orville Wright (Elliot Levey) himself, who remarks to old